Duns Scotus and those who think with him contend that the concept of being, derived as it is from our experience of finite being, if applied only analogically to infinite being would give us no genuine knowledge about the latter. They maintain that whenever a universal concept is applied to the objects in which it is _realized intrinsically_, it is affirmed of these objects _univocally_. The notion of being, in its most imperfect, inadequate, indeterminate sense, is, they say, _one and the same_ in so far forth as it is applicable to the infinite and the finite, and to all the modes of the finite; and it is therefore predicated of all univocally.(58) But although they apply the concept of being univocally to the infinite and the finite, _i.e._ to God and creatures, they admit that the _reality_ corresponding to this univocal concept is _totally different_ in God and in creatures: that God differs by _all that He is_ from creatures, and they by _all that they are_ from Him. While, however, Scotists emphasize the formal oneness or identity of the indeterminate common concept, followers of St. Thomas emphasize the fact that the various modes of being differ totally, by all that each of them is, from one another; and, from this radical diversity in the modes of being, they infer that the common concept should not be regarded as _simply_ the same, but only as _proportionally_ the same, as expressive of a _similar relation_ of each intrinsically different mode of reality to actual existence. Thomists lay still greater stress, perhaps, upon the second consideration referred to above, as a reason for regarding being as an analogical concept when affirmed of Creator and creature, or of substance and accident: the consideration that the finite is _dependent_ on the infinite, and accident on substance. If being is realized in a true and proper sense, and intrinsically, as it undoubtedly is, in whatever is distinguishable from nothingness, why not say that we should affirm being or reality of all things “either as a genus in the strict sense, or else in some sense not analogical but proper, after the manner in which we predicate a genus of its species and individuals?... Since the object of our universal idea of being is admitted to be really in all things, we can evidently abstract from what is proper to substance and to accident, just as we abstract from what is proper to plants and to animals when we affirm of these that they are living things.”(59)